Next week, Hobbit fans can head to theaters to see brand new footage from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. On November 4, Warner Bros. is hosting a worldwide theatrical fan event to celebrate the upcoming sequel, which will include a Q&A with several of the film’s stars. While the event will take place in cities all over the world, the four host cities – New York, Los Angeles, London and Wellington – will have stars in attendance, all linked by satellite, answering your questions.

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Bilbo’s unexpected journey continues this winter with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and Warner Bros. has a new banner out to show off some of the sights to come.

Whereas the last film’s marketing campaign was stuffed with dwarves, only the prettiest and most popular make the cut this time around. (Though you can barely make out a few of the others in the background, if you squint.) Instead, the artwork makes room for a couple of new characters, like Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans), along with old favorites like Gandalf (Ian McKellan) and Legolas (Orlando Bloom). Check it out after the jump.

Peter Jackson won’t be bringing the second chapter of his adaptation of The Hobbit to Comic Con this year. After all, what more do we need as a sizzle reel for the second movie than the first film, released barely more than six months ago? Furthermore, the director says that he doesn’t have time to complete a good new footage reel, and that cast and crew availability further close out chances of putting together a Comic Con panel.

Fans of Jackson’s take on Middle-Earth can all still get a new look at The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, however. A new video blog provided by Jackson shows the new work done in the past few months on the second and third chapters. This video blog, like most of the others Jackson sends from set, is long enough to be fairly detailed and to show the scope of the production. Even the task of doing pickup shots — the connective “in-between” bits often reserved for reshoots or extra hours late in the game — takes an army of people on movies like these.

Granted, part of the pickup process here is required to enact Jackson’s plan to spread the Hobbit story across three films rather than two. So it’s not exactly a typical scenario. Regardless, what follows is another good look at the effort required to capture Middle-Earth on film. (Or digital files, in this case.) Check it out below. Read More »

Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and Thorin Oakenshield will continue their journey on December 13 as Peter Jackson‘s second Hobbit film, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, hits theaters. It’s the sequel to last year’s hit An Unexpected Journeyand the prequel to 2014’s There And Back Again. Together, they’ll bridge the gap to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

In the second chapter of The Hobbit, the band of dwarves inch closer to the Lonely Mountain and a showdown with the dangerous dragon Smaug, who long ago stole the wealth of the dwarves for himself. The first trailer for the film has now been released. It gives us an idea of just how far Jackson is pushing this second film, which will introduce characters played by Evangeline Lilly, Luke Evans, Benedict Cumberbatch among others. Read More »

Orlando Bloom‘s most memorable roles tend to be dashing fantasy hero types, a la Lord of the Rings‘ Legolas or Pirates of the Caribbean‘s Will Turner, but Lance Daly‘s indie thriller The Good Doctor will see him heading toward the dark side, and in realistic, contemporary garb, no less.

Bloom plays Martin Blake, a bright, ambitious young doctor whose just can’t seem to get over a deep-seated sense of insecurity. When a flirty teenage patient (Riley Keough) gives him the ego boost he so desperately wants, he purposely keeps her ill so that she can’t leave his side. Taraji P. Henson, J.K. Simmons, Michael Peña, Rob Morrow, and Troy Garity also star. Watch the trailer after the jump.

It seems like Orlando Bloom‘s comeback is going to start…any…minute…now. He took a couple years off, and then did a film that there was reason to anticipate (Mark Ruffalo’s Sympathy For Delicious) and a few other projects that were destined to be baby steps back to public awareness more than anything else. (Main Street, The Good Doctor, and The Three Musketeers.)

Bloom has a couple additional films on the horizon: The Laureate; Cities; and a little thing called The Hobbit, in which he’ll reprise his breakout role of Legolas. But that role isn’t likely to be a particularly big part, and so there’s room for something else. So he’s added one more project: a South African crime tale called Zulu, in which he’ll co-star with Djimon Hounsou. Read More »

Ten years ago this week The Fellowship of the Ring was released. Peter Jackson‘s first Tolkien adaption silenced a great many naysayers who said J.R.R. Tolkien‘s novels could never be properly translated to film. It also fostered a mainstream interest in fantasy movies that continues a decade later.

The development of a film based on Tolkien’s original Middle-Earth novel, The Hobbit, was the subject of speculation as soon as Jackson started work on The Lord of the Rings. Actually making the movie was a terrifically complicated process that involved rights deals, the financial solvency of MGM, a long period of development under original director Guillermo del Toro, and the eventual return of Peter Jackson to the director’s chair.

Now the first teaser trailer — a long teaser, at that — has been released for the first of two films based on the novel. Get the first look at footage from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, after the break. Read More »

Find it hard to keep up with what films are casting and which actors and actress are doing what? You’re not the only one. It’s all but impossible to keep up with everything, which is why we bring you Casting Bits. Today we’ve got a bunch of big names in smaller movies, a few studio productions sprinkled in and then a couple we missed in recent days. After the jump read about: